The Temperature of the Garden: A Garden Where Water, Wind, and Warmth Stay

Background

The 2025 Seoul International Garden Show included a “Corporate Gardens” programme, in which Korean corporations commissioned publicly accessible gardens as a form of civic contribution. Among them, “The Temperature of the Garden” was commissioned by KyungDong Navien—a Korean company specialising in heating, cooling, and indoor environmental technology—and gifted by the company to the City of Seoul. After the Show closed, the garden remained in place as a permanent addition to Boramae Park.

Site

The chosen plot lies within Boramae Park, beside a small ecological pond—a clearing open on all sides, an underused leftover within an otherwise active park, with little shaded seating near the water. Because the garden would remain in place after the Show, the first design responsibility was not to dazzle but to fit—to operate as a missing piece of the park, supplying the rest, shade, and microclimate that this corner of Boramae had been waiting for.

Concept

The garden brings Navien’s vision of “Optimizing Around You” into the public realm across all four seasons. The cool shade beneath the trees, the sound of water flowing through a cascade, the floral scent on the breeze, and the warmth of heated benches come together to offer a multisensory moment of rest in the heart of the city. The project takes one of Navien’s core domains—thermal comfort—and treats it as a landscape material. Where most gardens are designed with plants, water, and stone, “The Temperature of the Garden” is also designed with warmth and coolness—orchestrating one of the most direct experiences a body has with a place, and making legible something usually invisible: the air around us.

A Single Integrated Body

The signature gesture is one continuous structure that fuses three elements normally kept apart: a canopy that provides shade, a generous lounge bench, and a wall-and-water assembly that handles microclimate. Rather than scattering amenities across the site, we drew them into a single body so that shelter, seat, and atmosphere operate together. Visitors do not move between facilities; they settle into a single environment tuned around them.

Microclimate in Summer

Two cool-air streams are designed to meet at the bench. From the front, a breeze passes over the pond’s surface, loses heat to the water, and reaches the visitor measurably cooler than the surrounding air. From behind, water descends through a cascade; below it, a chamber circulates shaded, water-conditioned air that drifts forward along the visitor’s back, producing a noticeably cooler pocket than ordinary shade. The water leaves the cascade through a shallow rill long enough for visitors to dip their feet. The two streams meet at the seat, set to the cadence of moving water.

Microclimate in Winter

A Navien boiler—the company’s signature product—circulates warm water through the bench, turning the seat into a heated outdoor lounge that holds people in the garden well past the season when most public landscapes go quiet. The same continuous body that buffers heat in summer becomes a small thermal refuge against the cold, and the act of sitting outdoors in January or February—uncommon in this climate—becomes possible.

The garden composes its experience in deliberate layers. Sight: filtered light through the canopy, the pond’s surface, seasonal blooms. Sound: cascade, rill, leaves. Scent: perennials chosen for seasonal fragrance. Touch: the temperature-controlled bench, water on the skin, gravel and timber.

The garden has no fences. Three openings are marked instead by low feature walls and paving patterns derived from a geometric reinterpretation of Navien’s corporate identity. These thresholds quietly tell the visitor, “you have entered The Temperature of the Garden,” while preserving openness toward the surrounding park. Branding becomes spatial syntax rather than signage.
After sunset, integrated lighting recasts the same elements in a different register. The cascade becomes a luminous surface, the canopy throws softened shadows across the seating, and the pond mirrors the lit edges—a second garden within a single day.

Often associated with short-lived branded installations, the corporate garden is here reframed as something more durable: a private partner gifting a public room to the city. New trees soften the previously open edge along the pond, and the planting, materials, and details were specified for long-term performance under public maintenance. The programme—a place to sit, to dip one’s feet, to settle in the shade by the water—is one the park can absorb into everyday use.

Credits
Client / Donor: KyungDong Navien
Organiser: 2025 Seoul International Garden Show, City of Seoul
Location: Boramae Park, Dongjak-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Year of completion: 2025
Landscape Architect: HLD
Construction: Spacemaker A1

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